Introduction

Building on the thought of Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, and Alberto Moreiras, the Introduction proposes globalization as the disastrous passing of a historical limit. Faith in the relations between the modern production of wealth in the form of commodity fetishism, capitalist development, human progress, the freedom of the subject, and the philosophy of history that has anchored all of them since the Enlightenment is succumbing before a generalized sense of expiration and of growing stupefaction. The Introduction presents recent debates on the notion of infrapolitics as a thinking dedicated to the question of clearing a way through the problem of globalization, in the name of existence. The Introduction explains the question of the historical limit, the terms of the debate on infrapolitics, the structure of the ensuing Passages, and the raison d’etre of the entire book.

Contemporary Turmoil

In this passage the contemporary is the eclipse of a notion of political authority grounded previously in the representation of the ‘mortal God’ of Hobbesian sovereignty. It is also, however, its permanent reactionary regurgitation in the form of political demagoguery, brute force, and biopolitical absolutism. We live in the exhaustion of the classical and modern structure of the katechon, or Christian metaphysics of restraint. This challenges in particular the validity of the notion of hegemony. Through specific discussions of contemporary and past political thinking (Lenin, Gramsci, Cacciari, Laclau and Moufee, etc.), this passage moves in the direction of the infrapolitical as an absolutely necessary proposition in the wake of the apotheosis and closure of the era of bourgeois revolution and the integral nation-state. It is a thinking attuned to an existential analytic that cannot be exhausted in the history of our modern biopolitical representation.

Narco-Accumulation

This passage examines narco-accumulation—or illicit globalization—as a contemporary modality of war with specific existential connotations. It challenges previously sovereign national territory, which is now reconverted into the ritualized performance, living geography, and paramilitary end-game of post-katechontic force. For example, it realigns Mexico’s military-economic relation to the North, while also redefining and intensifying Mexican paramilitary force’s relation of dominance over the impoverished political spaces of, and the migrant bodies that flee from the social violence in, Central America. The national territory of Mexico becomes the new border, the tomb of the proper, the negation of space by space. The passage ends with the image of contemporary Central American migration to the U.S. as the site for an infrapolitical thinking of existence, capable of undermining the domination of the political over existence. This is the clearing promised throughout the book.

Exordium

The Preface offers the reader an introductory illustration of the relation between infrapolitics and the every-day language of contemporary turmoil. It examines the words of the Extinction Rebellion leader Greta Thurnberg and the way she places the routine political calculations internal to capitalism in another light, reconverting the familiarity and ordinariness of home, for example, into the unfamiliar ground of an existential conflagration. Thunberg insists on safeguarding a distance from reigning forms of political calculation and power brokering. She does this in order to speak freely about the epoch which is ours. If it were not for that commonplace distance from political calculation itself, she would be just another bureaucrat of the given in search of a way to live in the shadow of a fully accepted master discourse. Via a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, this section illustrates the relation between contemporary globalization and the question of existence. Infrapolitical Passages announces itself herein as an approach to the question of the inseparable relation between existence, responsibility, and the future of reason. The Preface stages infrapolitics as a necessary distance from the political, in the name of existence.